User Experience of Digital Leisure Technologies

In my research I aim to understand people’s experiences with
digital leisure. I define digital leisure as any leisure activity that utilizes
technology. My research questions include:

What does a positive experience with a
technology (e.g. immersion) look like? How can we measure this experience?

What factors attract a person to take on a new
technology? Which factors put them off?

How do game mechanisms affect people’s
motivations to keep playing/ keep using an online service?

How can we design citizen science projects to
sustain people’s motivations for longer?

Immersion

During my PhD research at UCLIC, I investigated people’s
immersive experiences playing video games. I designed the Immersive Experience
Questionnaire (IEQ), a questionnaire that can be used by researchers to
quantify immersive experiences (Jennett et al., 2008). In our journal paper we
explain how the questionnaire was created and validated; it has received over 300
citations to date.

Privacy and Trust

During my first Post-doc at UCL Info-Sec, I investigated
privacy and trust issues that affected whether a person chose to use an online
service. In 2012 our conference paper “Too close for comfort” was awarded a CHI
honourable mention; this is awarded to the top 5% of CHI submissions. We
explain that the more personalized a targeted advert is (e.g. using the
person’s name, photo), the more likely it is to be noticed, but also the more
uncomfortable the person felt (Malheiros et al., 2012). We argue that this
finding is an important tradeoff that social networking sites should consider
as they are starting to use increasingly more personalized ads.

Citizen Science

Currently, in my second Post-doc at UCLIC, I am
investigating motivations for participating in citizen science projects. Citizen
science is a type of crowd-sourcing, where volunteers (‘citizen scientists’)
collaborate with professional scientists to conduct scientific research. By
utilizing the Internet, allowing volunteers to participate via a website or a
mobile app, there is potential for scientists to recruit the help of many
volunteers. However there is also the added challenge of coordinating work and
keeping volunteers motivated, as the volunteers and scientists have very little
face-to-face interaction.

Working on the Citizen Cyberlab project, I have co-authored
several conference papers about citizen science so far, including two CHI
papers. In Iacovides et al. (2013) we explain that people do not choose to join
a citizen science game because they like games, but because they have an
intrinsic interest in the topic. This finding is useful for researchers
thinking about gamifying their citizen science project, as it highlights that
game mechanisms should be thought of as a way to sustain the attention of interested
volunteers, and not as a way of attracting gamers to volunteer.

In Eveleigh et al. (2014) we explore the complex
relationship between motivations and contribution. While high contributors were
deeply engaged by social or competitive features, low contributors described a
solitary experience of ‘dabbling’ in projects for short periods. We argue that
since the majority of participants exhibit this small-scale contribution
pattern, there is great potential value in designing interfaces to tempt lone
workers to complete ‘just another page’ or to lure early drop-outs back into
participation.

If you would like to find out more about my research then please check out my publications. You can also follow me on Twitter @CharleneJennett